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Playing between industry and academia: reflections on my placement with Makers of Imaginary Worlds

post by Daniel Swann (2021 cohort)

Introduction

As part of my PhD project at the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, I underwent a placement throughout the summer of 2022 with my industry partner Makers of Imaginary Worlds (MOIW)—an arts company that designs interactive installations for young children and families. Interestingly, the company was founded by Horizon CDT alumnus Roma Patel (2013 cohort) and many of its ongoing projects have grown from her own doctoral research. As such, the three months I spent working alongside MOIW offered an invaluable insight into how the central issue of my own PhD—that is, how children’s playful experiences can inform interactive technologies—are engaged within the “real world.”

As is typical within the creative industries, MOIW is a small company for whom no two working days are the same. Furthermore, by creating interactive art installations with innovative technological features, it engages regularly with a wide variety of stakeholders including cultural institutions, local families, and the research community. Fortunately, this meant that my placement involved a range of different activities, and I will share the main experiences from my time spent working with MOIW over the course of this blog post. Ultimately, I hope to identify some key takeaway points of how this experience has shaped my research which gesture towards how industry can productively engage with academia more generally.

TAS HUB All Hands Meeting

After settling in and getting acquainted with the team at MOIW, one of the first major events on the agenda was presenting at the annual Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) All Hands Meeting in London. The TAS Hub is a UKRI-funded project which aims to encourage collaboration and world-class research into autonomous systems around six main nodes: functionality, governance and regulation, resilience, security, trust, and verifiability. While this covers a vast range of activities involving everyone from senior academics to policymakers, the TAS Hub also works with “artists, musicians, directors, writers, and performers” as part of its Creative Strand to express its research aims in a way that is more accessible to the public.

The All Hands Meeting is an opportunity for all those working under the TAS umbrella to share their projects and, as such, I joined MOIW to present their artistic residency as part of the 2022 TAS programme. This was centred around the installation NED: the Never-Ending Dancer. NED is a robotic arm that has been programmed to dance with children who engage with it through movement and face recognition technology. It was previously part of a larger installation called Thingamabobas but was isolated for a pilot study in April 2022 in which we attempted to understand how children understand and engage with a robot that is behaving in a playful way. More details of this study as part of the TAS artistic residency can be found on the MOIW website.

While representing MOIW with NED beside me in the live exhibition space, I received a lot of interest in the project—particularly from researchers who were working in areas that had little to do with children or the arts. Some of the conversations that occurred, as a result, justified the TAS Hub’s claim that creative applications can often open the space for dialogue better than research or technology alone can. It also provided me with valuable experience in presenting studies that I’m involved with to an entirely new audience.

Alongside the live exhibition space, the All Hands Meeting also featured talks and panel discussions from a number of academics working on TAS projects. I ended the two-day event by attending the TAS Programme Early Career Researcher dinner, which offered a great opportunity to network with fellow PGRs and learn more about how they are engaging with the various nodes that contribute towards the TAS Hub.

Home:Zero Study

The next major phase of my placement was involving the HOME-Zero project. HOME-Zero is “a creative research and development project to help ignite a public conversation about the relationship between household emissions and climate change.” Makers of Imaginary Worlds were commissioned for this project and produced an original interactive installation in collaboration with Lakeside Arts and the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and through a series of co-design sessions involving young families from the local area that took place over several weeks. The installation was exhibited at the National Gallery X studio and Lakeside Arts in May 2022, but an additional exhibition was organised for Strelley Road Library during my placement towards the end of July.

The set-up of the installation itself proved challenging and was therefore a valuable insight into the practicalities of producing interactive experiences that are suitable for a wide variety of contexts. The installation was designed for use in gallery or theatre spaces and had to be adapted to the library, including alterations to the functionality of certain elements and impromptu repurposing of others. There were logistical difficulties also: some of the technology included in the installation required support from various collaborators and getting in touch with them when needed in the short window of time provided for set-up proved challenging. We recognised that it would have been useful to have a detailed technical documentation for the installation beforehand. However, the unique way in which HOME-Zero was (co-)created meant that there were limited resources (namely, time) for producing such documentation.

Despite the difficulties of reproducing the HOME-Zero experience at a public library, the response proved it was more than worthwhile. Families from the local area were able to enjoy this experience—complete with interactive technological features and an engaging actor/facilitator—and begin intergenerational conversations around sustainability and household consumption. Along with the overwhelmingly positive response, I was able to conduct interviews with some of the families involved in the co-design process of HOME-Zero who offered unique perspectives on the installation that are likely to contribute to a future publication.

Theatre Hullabaloo and The Undiscovered Island

Beyond the smaller and more miscellaneous tasks involved with the placement, the final major project involved taking MOIW’s The Undiscovered Island installation to Theatre Hullabaloo. This venue, based in Darlington, is innovative for providing a space dedicated to theatre for younger audiences. Although The Undiscovered Island is one of MOIW’s most toured installations, it required some preparation before going to the theatre to be in exhibition for 6 months in total!

The Undiscovered Island is an immersive experience for young children to learn about the ecological challenges faced by coral reefs through several different interactive technologies. Some of the artefacts included in the exhibition had been developed from prototypes and were therefore identified as needing minor repairs and reinforcement. For a few weeks in August, I occupied a bay in the Mixed Reality Lab to work on some of the artefacts, which mainly involved resoldering, swapping out components, and stress-testing to try to reproduce 6 months of interactions and to ensure that all the artefacts were safe for small children to use. Although not all the repairs were straightforward, I was fortunate to have help from colleagues at MOIW and other researchers working in the Mixed Reality Lab who were happy (or at least willing) to help! With everything ready to go, myself and the MOIW team set off for Darlington to spend a week getting The Undiscovered Island ready.

The set-up itself went well and it was a pleasure to work with friendly colleagues from both MOIW and Theatre Hullabaloo, which truly does fantastic work for the communities it serves. Like at Strelley Road Library, we had to make some decisions on how best to adapt the installation to the space but within a few days, we had everything up and running and ready to open by mid-September. In contrast to my experience at the TAS All Hands Meeting, my time working in Darlington was characterised by collaborating with individuals who were vastly experienced in many aspects of my research although from a largely non-academic perspective. I found this to be particularly beneficial as I could learn more about the concerns of important stakeholders in my research—namely young families and arts practitioners—in an organic and meaningful way. On a more practical level, it also allowed me to work with individuals and institutions with whom I may be able to collaborate further at some point in the future.

Conclusion

As the placement drew to an end and I made my transition back into being a full-time PhD student, I was able to reflect on how these months working with MOIW may inform my research going forward.

    • Seek opportunities to share research with the wider community. Some of the insights offered by researchers from ostensibly unrelated fields at the TAS All Hands Meeting were truly interesting and valuable. While it is obviously important to keep consistently in contact with one’s own research community (the field of child-computer interaction, in my case), I believe taking opportunities to present in different contexts can produce surprising benefits.
    • Never underestimate the value of even the simplest documentation. In the case of HOME-Zero, it wasn’t possible to produce thorough documentation for set-up due to time restrictions. Nevertheless, I learned that making notes along the way can result in massively improve efficiency later. I imagine this to be as true for setting up an installation as it is for writing a conference paper, for example.
    • Get into the field with your “researcher hat” only half-on. Conventional academic forms of gathering information from stakeholders—such as through interviews or focus groups—have their uses but also their limitations. Collaborating directly with someone who works in my field shed light on various issues that I hadn’t previously considered and is the type of opportunity that an industry placement can uniquely offer.

Those who work in the arts and those who work with children often have unconventional working habits when compared with other industries. As a company that does both, this is certainly true for Makers of Imaginary Worlds! But this meant that my placement was a hugely valuable experience in allowing me a deeper understanding of the opportunities available beyond my doctoral studies, both in the sense of what may come after my PhD and the impact my research can be made outside of academia.

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Reflection on the British Machine Vision Association summer school

post by Muhammad Suhaib Shahid (2020 cohort)

Over the summer of 2022, I attended the annual British Machine Vision Association summer school at The University of East Anglia. The weeklong summer school provided an opportunity for computer vision researchers, in both academia and industry, to explore a wide range of computer vision topics through intensive lectures and labs. From the 11th to the 15th of July, I had the chance to learn from expert instructors, participate in hands-on activities, and connect with other professionals and students in my field. In this reflection, I will share my key takeaways and insights from the summer school, as well as any challenges or setbacks I faced and how I overcame them. I will also discuss the impact of summer school on my personal and professional development.

Over the course of the week, I had the opportunity to learn from expert researchers from some of the most active research groups in the field of computer vision both in the UK and abroad. Throughout the series of lectures, they provided comprehensive overviews of the fundamental concepts and techniques of image processing and analysis, as well as lectures on unsupervised learning, image segmentation and deep learning for Computer Vision. Though most computer vision researchers are very much adept in these areas, re-covering these subjects proved key for a complete understanding of the advanced topics that we encountered later in the program.

Over the five-day period, there were 16 lectures and one lab with each session being run by an expert lecturer or instructor in that specific field. Most relevant to my research were two afternoon sessions held on days two and three. The first headed by Oscar A. Mendez on “Deep Learning for Computer Vision” and the second by Chris Willcocks on “The concepts and characteristics of different deep generative modelling approaches”. The two sessions addressed the use of Computer Vision in medical image processing and synthesis, a topic key to my research. Deep learning, which is a type of machine learning that uses neural networks to learn from large amounts of data, was a reoccurring theme throughout the week. Many researchers, myself included, encounter issues surrounding finding large enough data sets, a problem prevalent, especially when working with medical imaging.  I found these topics to be particularly interesting, as they are at the forefront of computer vision research and have many practical applications in a variety of fields.

In addition to the lectures and discussions, we also had the opportunity to participate in a few hands-on activities that allowed us to apply what we were learning in a practical setting. The afternoon session of the first day took place in a computer lab. Working on individual tasks, through helping each other along when needed, we implemented various PyTorch functionalities from scratch. It was fascinating to see how the tools and packages used in our everyday work as researchers are implemented, something that often crosses my mind now months later whilst undertaking various programming endeavours.  I appreciated the opportunity to work with my team and receive both instruction and feedback from the instructors.

One of the most memorable experiences I had during the summer school was the opportunity to connect with other professionals and students interested in computer vision. The program brought together a diverse group of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and even countries. It was inspiring to see the different perspectives and approaches that people brought to the table. We had several networking events and social activities that provided us with the opportunity to get to know each other and learn about each other’s interests and goals. I made some lasting connections that I believe will be beneficial in my future academic and professional endeavours.

Overall, the summer school has had a significant impact on my personal and professional development. In addition to learning about the technical aspects of computer vision, I also gained valuable skills in networking, problem-solving, and communication. I feel more confident in my ability to design and implement computer vision systems, and I am excited to explore the many applications of this technology in the future. However, the summer school was not without its challenges and setbacks. One of the biggest challenges I faced was keeping up with the fast-paced nature of the program. There was a lot of information to absorb in a short period of time, and I found myself struggling to keep up at times. However, I was able to overcome this challenge by staying organized, asking for help when I needed it, and making the most of the resources available to me.

I do have a few suggestions for improving the summer school experience for future participants: it would be helpful to have more time for networking and connecting with professionals in the field. While I enjoyed the opportunity to meet and collaborate with other students, I also think it would be valuable to have more structured opportunities to engage with industry professionals and learn about career paths in computer vision. There was only a lecture that briefly touched on how to find the best post-research opportunities. Additionally, the time allocated to lab work was not sufficient. There was only one session, and no opportunity to implement our knowledge in any real-life scenarios; I would suggest that future events take advantage of the wide knowledge base available and allow students to work in groups, fostering greater opportunities to apply their domain-specific knowledge.

In conclusion, the summer school on computer vision was a valuable and enriching experience that has had a lasting impact on my personal and professional development. I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned from expert instructors and to have connected with other like-minded individuals. I highly recommend this summer school to anyone interested in exploring the exciting field of computer vision!

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Angela meets Industry Partner to discuss their future strategy

post by Angela Thornton

I’ve just come back from 5 days in Nardo, Southern Italy where I was on retreat with my industry partner the Carboncopies Foundation (CCF). We stayed in Relais Monastero Santa Teresa – a 13th-century baronial palace which was subsequently converted into a cloistered monastery. The bedrooms were all beautifully unique and our meeting rooms were equally stunning even if getting the Wi fi to work and finding enough plug sockets and adapters could be challenging! We had a few hours off on the Friday to explore the historic town with its cobbled streets and beautiful buildings and even managed a short trip to the nearby seaside on Sunday when it was a lovely sunny day.

However, we had an intensive schedule which involved launching new departments and initiatives and also progressing existing projects. I’m on the Board and actively involved in both the main Research and Education offices as well as leading the Ethics department so there was a lot of information to discuss and disseminate. Specifically I led an ideation session on an Ethical Framework for Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) which is one of my key areas of responsibility for 2023 and beyond. This is an active research area but WBE in humans is likely to take many decades so planning to ensure responsible research and innovation is challenging. Thankfully as an ex-industry researcher, I have considerable experience in ethics and codes of conduct and was on the Ethics and Compliance Committee for the British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association. Hence I was able to draw on that experience to moderate a creative session to identify key topics and risks. Following idea generation, we conducted some interim thematic analysis which I will review and develop to provide a draft table of contents for the Ethical Framework. This first iteration is an internal process, but CCF will subsequently consult with other experts in the field with the aim of authoring the first set of Ethical Guidelines for WBE.  It was particularly productive to have members of the CCF who aren’t always directly involved in ethics as they bought a unique perspective.

The event was notable not just in how much we achieved collaboratively but how enjoyable it was to spend time with people that I had only previously met virtually. Our shared memories will include some entertaining moments including star gazing from the roof and spinning LED glow poi.

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Reflection on outreach: Dstl AI Fest 4

post by Matthew Yates (2018 cohort)

In October 2021 I gave a presentation on my PhD project at Dstl’s AI Fest 4. This is a now annual event held by Dstl and attended by various government departments, industry partners and academic researchers. The event was held online over a virtual conference meetings platform with over 100 different talks from AI experts over the course of two days.

The central aim of the event was to discuss topics surrounding “Trustworthy AI” with Dstl stating their mission is “to de-mystify the area of AI by helping MOD understand how it can responsibly and ethically adopt AI in order to deter and de-escalate conflict, save lives and reduce harm.” Like other virtual conferences that become the norm during the pandemic there were different panels where attendees could interact with the speakers during Q&As as well as various networking rooms to talk to others about research.

I presented my work as part of the “AI Methods and Models” panel, with my then-current working title for my PhD and presentation being “Accurate Detection Methods for Image Synthesis”. As I had done multiple previous presentations for my PhD at various stages of the project I knew the content quite well but made some adjustments for my specific audience and what I wanted to focus on as the key message of my work. As I was presenting a work in progress, with still a year of research to go, I decided it would be best that I focus on the importance of the interdisciplinary methodologies I was using for my project rather than any final models or results (which I was still currently working on). I also thought it might help differentiate mine from the rest of the panel which was concerned with various novel implementations of machine learning models.

In my presentation, I gave a brief overview of myself and my project’s background as well as a short explanation of Generative Adversarial Networks for those in the audience who were less familiar with deep learning models. The main content of my presentation however was my mixed methods approach to looking at fake image detection. I explained how as the objective of a lot of fake image generation is to fool human visual perception (e.g. fake news, deep fakes etc) taking a human-centric approach to investigating novel detection methods is equally, if not more important, than looking at purely algorithmic solutions. I then presented the results of my initial image detection study which found differences in detection behaviour between computational and human detection methods as well as differences between experts and novices. As this was the part of my research plan I was currently up to, I spent the rest of the presentation discussing the implications for my current results and how they were going to inform the rest of my work. At the end of the presentation, I took a short Q&A with questions about possible other metrics I could use to measure human visual perception towards image detection like eye tracking and also how to combine this research with automated methods. Both of these questions were easy for me to answer as fortunately they were both ideas that I had planned to explore myself at the final stage of my research.

On reflection, I thought I had gotten my main points across in an engaging way and had been able to communicate it to people of differing levels of technical backgrounds, however, with it being held online it was much more difficult to get a sense of this than if I had been presenting face to face. Although presenting to a screen can sometimes alleviate any nerves in presenting to a large, live audience, I find it can also be quite hard when you don’t have any visual feedback from audience members present.

Despite some of the reservations I still have towards online conferences I did find my experience presenting at Dstl’s AI Fest useful. In addition to the experience of having to communicate my research to a live audience, it was also a useful opportunity to get to know other people either at Dstl or in industry. The timing of the event coincided with my 3-month Dstl internship so some of the people I was working with at the time also attended the conference and could get an idea of what kind of work I was doing at Horizon and the Computer Vision Lab for my PhD project.

 

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Presenting the Future of Healthcare at the Cobot Maker Space

post by Angela Higgins (2022 cohort)

Students from the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training were hosted by the Cobot Maker Space to present their visions of healthcare utopias, and how to avoid ending up in a medical dystopia.

From robotics and AI to health tracking and gene sequencing, are we headed towards a utopian or dystopian future for healthcare? For Future Products Sector Day at the Horizon CDT programme, our group were asked to present our future visions of healthcare to the PhD cohort. Using the range of robots available in the Cobot space, we demonstrated and discussed how these technologies could be used to the benefit or detriment of human wellbeing in the future.

Demonstrations included a UV cleaning robot which could be used to disinfect hospitals, telepresence robots which could be used for remote doctors’ visits, and companion robots for older people. In a walkaround tour of the living space, an experimental area designed to simulate a home living room and kitchen, we demonstrated how Internet of Things sensors could be used to monitor activity and help people track their health. These technologies have great potential to allow people to take control of their wellbeing, keep medical professionals in the loop and ultimately allow people to live in their own homes for longer. However, this raises questions about surveillance, data protection, privacy, and dignity for older people.

Academics from the University of Nottingham contributed their expertise, including Professor Praminda Caleb-Solly, who spoke about her work researching robots to help support older people. Praminda spoke about work at the CHART research group, and how robots could be used to enable and enhance human-human interaction for health and care, rather than replace it. Epidemiology PhD student Salma Almidani also spoke via video interview, discussing future pandemics, vaccine hesitancy, and where technologies may be useful in healthcare ecosystems of the future.

The afternoon was finished off with the talks from us, in the 2022 cohort. Jon Chaloner spoke about universal health coverage and how we can work towards providing everyone worldwide with a full range of accessible healthcare across their lifetime. Gift Odoh talked about how healthcare and telepresence robotics can influence and benefit each other, through technology and knowledge exchange. Finally, I closed by talking about the future of pain, and how we could use robotic devices and sensing technology to better understand and respond to and manage pain.

The afternoon provided a range of emerging perspectives on the future of healthcare, and debate about how these technologies could be used and abused. Ultimately, by discussing and exploring imagined utopias of the future, perhaps we can identify routes to get there, whilst avoiding some of the dystopic pitfalls along the way.

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‘Interactions with Coffee Wizard’: Reflections on a first conference paper

post by Oliver Miles (2018 cohort)

Overview

In my first paper, ‘Interactions with CoffeeWizard’ I gave an account of participant interaction with a values-orientated choice and prediction framework, embedded through a coffee selection box activity in the home. It was originally submitted for the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2021 conference, but despite feedback citing key points of merit including good alignment venue, a sound methodology, and agreement with the general line of argument, the paper was unfortunately rejected at first pass. Despite reading and re-reading the reviewer’s comments at the time, it is only now during the process of writing up a new study based on the same framework that I fully appreciate and can apply the suggested changes.

In the following, I will give an overview of the paper, the motivation for writing it and for specifically choosing the CSCW venue. I will then reflect on the more practical points of collaboration and advice during paper drafting, before outlining some of the feedback I received and how I intend to improve my next submission based on this. Hopefully, sharing some of my insights regarding responding to reviews can help others – particularly if they are writing their first paper as a solo author.

‘Interactions with CoffeeWizard’

Broadly, my thesis explores the use of discrete value sets such as product attributes and personal end-goals in life, as grounds for personalization in the recommendation of everyday coffee consumption. The purpose of my first study was to deploy a novel interaction framework for surveying, predicting, and eliciting retrospection on personal value preferences, elicited through coffee choice selection and reflected the participant as infographics. Realised through the initial questionnaire, coffee selection activity, and follow-up interview, this would allow me to demonstrate the kinds of interaction elicited at each stage of the framework and improve the proposition so that it captures this as rich, contextual data. The study was delivered as a domestic deployment due to Covid-19 restrictions at the time. In the findings, I present and discuss the results of interviews with 12 participants, whose reflections enabled a discussion based on the emergent, practical values of selecting coffee based on its reputed value attributes and making choices incongruent/congruent with apparent predictions.

Motivations

In terms of motivation for the paper, I wanted to share my theoretical ideas with peers in the human computer interaction (HCI) community whose work tends towards testing and developing prototypes. I chose the CSCW conference as it positions itself as ‘…a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, and communities’[1], which is well aligned with the practicalities of incorporating social research and HCI methodology. More broadly, this was my first opportunity to formally share ideas with an HCI audience whose common idioms can be challenging to adopt when approaching the field from another discipline.

Paper preparation

If you are completely new to paper writing like I was for this piece, I would recommend attending any of the Research Academy courses related to effective writing as soon as you get the opportunity. Paper writing is fundamentally different in my experience from other forms of academic writing as it requires your work to retain its originality while at the same time reflecting the nuances of the conference or journal, not to mention strict formatting and editorial guidelines.  Supervisor feedback is therefore also crucial during the drafting process.  It can be tempting to wait until you have entire finished sections or even a full draft before you seek feedback. To counter this, I have found that the following ‘skeleton paper’ approach works for me:

    • Outline the known section headings from ‘introduction’ to ‘conclusion’
    • Break these down further into the main substantive points you wish to cover
    • Ensure there is a clear narrative that will bring your reader to the intended contribution

This can effectively read as a full draft while allowing efficient iterations, which can be further substantiated once the main concepts and contributions become coherent.

Handling Reviewers’ Comments

It is easy in hindsight to see the extent to which I was/was not following my own advice regarding paper preparation. On the one hand, reviewers picked up on some key merits which resonated with my intended contribution: The proposition appeared to give ‘insightful’ findings; the issue of value-based personalization was agreed as a relevant interactional one, and the methodology itself was judged to be appropriate. These points were generally very encouraging given the wider implication of the validity of my thesis.

Nevertheless, under-developed contributions and literature selections were significant enough to result in rejection. In the first case, I reflect that I had not invested enough in the preparation of the paper specifically, a paper for the CSCW audience. This left reviewers with a sense that they were being left to draw out findings relevant to them, instead of having them clearly outlined. This is intrinsically linked to the second concern regarding literature selection. I had only referenced one CSCW publication, with the rest of my sources coming from other conferences or journals. So, while the material I based my work on was described as ‘relevant’, it made it difficult for reviewers to link any contribution back to work specifically emanating from the venue itself.

Role of paper within PhD

‘Interactions with CoffeeWizard’ continues to play a significant role in my thesis as the first deployment of a novel, values-orientated personalization framework. Expanding on the literature section and aligning the contribution more closely with contemporary works from CSCW, the work now forms the first empirical chapter of my thesis. In this sense, I hope that reviewer feedback has improved the communication of my work for my PhD itself, as well as informed me how I am currently approaching write-up of my final study to a similar venue in 2023.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/conference/cscw

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Call for Participants: STUDY OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXCESSIVE VIEWING ON DEMAND

post by Joanne Parkes (2020 cohort)

As some of you know, I’m a 3rd-year Horizon CDT PhD student partnered with BBC Research & Development and based within N/Lab at the University of Nottingham. I am researching binge-watching behaviours and how we might better manage them if they’re problematic.

Purpose: For this study, I am looking for participants to take part in a 1:1 interview via an online Teams meeting to discuss their viewing habits, perspectives on binge watching and thoughts on why/when people might watch more than they intend.

Who can participate? This study is open to anyone aged 18 and over who regularly (typically at least once a week) watches 2 or more episodes of the same programme and/or 2 or more continuous hours of on-demand television as their main activity.

Commitment: The interview should take around 60 minutes to complete.

Reward: £15.00 Amazon e-voucher for your participation.

How to participate: Email me at joanne.parkes@nottingham.ac.uk to express your interest and arrange a mutually convenient meeting time. Evenings and weekends will also be available.

More information is available. For any queries, please feel free to contact me using the email address provided.

Read more about my research project.

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Call for Participants: Fake Image Detection w/ Eye tracking

post by Matthew Yates (2018 cohort)

I am a final year Horizon CDT PhD student partnered with the Dstl. My PhD project is about the detection of deep learning-generated aerial images, with the final goal of improving current detection models.

For my study, I am looking for participants to take part in my short face-to-face study on detecting fake aerial images. We have used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create these.

I am looking for participants from all backgrounds, as well as those who have specific experience in dealing with either Earth Observation Data (e.g. aerial imagery, satellite images) or GAN-generated images.

Purpose: To capture gaze behaviour during the detection of GAN generated fake images from real aerial photos of rural and urban environments. Participant accuracy and eye movements will be recorded.

Who can participate? This is open to anyone who would like to take part, although the involvement of people with experience dealing with related image data (e.g. satellite images, GAN images) is of particular interest.

Commitment: The study should take between 20-40 mins to complete and takes place in Room B73 Computer Science Building Jubilee Campus

Reward: £10 amazon voucher for your participation

How to participate? Email me at matthew.yates1@nottingham.ac.uk with dates/times that you are free to arrange a timeslot

For any additional information or queries please feel free to contact me,

Thanks for your time,

Matt

+44 (0) 747 386 1599 | matthew.yates1@nottingham.ac.uk 

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Map Check

post by Vincent Bryce (2019 cohort)

This summer saw me walking St Cuthbert’s Way, a 100km hiking trail in the Scottish Borders/Northumbria area with my children. It was a great trip, plenty of challenge but achievable, and I’d recommend it:  https://www.stcuthbertsway.info/long-distance-route/

The trail was well signed, but needed us to use our map and compass in places. It’s three years since I started the PhD, two of which were part-time, and it feels like a good time to check where I am and where I’m going:

Where am I

I’m starting the third year of a part-time PhD in the Horizon CDT, focussing on responsible research and innovation (RRI) and Human Resource information systems. This is about exploring how organisations can innovate responsibly with digital technologies, the challenges this involves, and some of the specific issues for HR technologies.

I’ve chosen a Thesis by concurrent publications route => a set of related studies rather than one overarching thesis.

Where am I going

I am going to complete my PhD and plan to come back into full time HR work, applying the insights into my digital HR work. The experience of being a student and researcher at the University I work will help me keep a strong customer focus.

What have I done so far

Following a year of taught activity about a range of digital economy and computer science topics, I’ve completed a series of studies and articles.

Highlights include a study on published Responsible Innovation case studies exploring the benefits of RRI, pieces on HR analytics and their ethical implications, presenting at the Ethicomp, CIPD Applied Research, and Philosophy of Management conferences, and critical articles on wider challenges for responsible innovation such as low-code technologies and crosscultural aspects.

I’ve seen new ideas and emerging technologies, and built skills in cding, data science, writingm writing to data science, and from bot based blogging, digital watercoolers and AI coaching to augmented and virtual reality tools.

What are my main findings to date

  • Responsible innovation practices are associated with business benefits.
  • Digital technologies, in particular ones users can reconfigure for themselves, pose challenges for responsible innovation methodologies, because these tend to rely on the technology being developed in ways which anticipate and respond to societal needs. End users, rather than scientists and developers, are increasingly able to innovate for themselves.
  • Algorithmic HR technologies give HR new capabilities, but are linked to some ethical concerns and have features which imply a need for responsible innovation and implementation.
  • Interviews with HRIS suppliers have limited opportunities to engage wider stakeholders and anticipate downstream impacts, creating reliance on client organisations to reflect on how they apply the technologies.
  • The knowledge and values of HR practitioners are a critical constraint on responsible algorithmic HR adoption.

What are my priorities for the coming year

Completing my thesis synthesis document; concluding in-progress studies on the increasing scope of employee data collection, and HRIS supplier and practitioner perspectives; and getting in position to submit by Sep 2023.

Right – onwards! I’ve recently attended the Productivity & the Futures of Work GRP conference on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies in the Workplace to present about my study on the increasing scope of employee data collection and hear about what’s hot and what’s not.

originally posted on Vincent’s blog

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AI, Mental health and the Human

post by Shazmin Majid (2018 cohort)

Pint of Science 2022 – Bunkers Hill, Nottingham

Venue:
Pint of Science 2022
Bunkers Hill, Nottingham

I delivered a talk about AI, mental health and the human at Pint of Science 2022 this year which had the theme “A Head Start of Health”. Pint of Science is a grassroots non-profit organisation that runs a worldwide science festival and brings researchers to a local pub/café/space to share their scientific discoveries with you, where no prior knowledge is needed. There are over 24,000 attendees in the U.K with over 600 events in over 45 cities. There were three talks at the time focusing on the theme of mental health.

Structure of the talk:

    1. What is AI
    2. How AI is being used in mental health
    3. AI and mental health: my cool experiences
    4. My current issues with AI and mental health

After days of practice and even delivering the jokes on cue whilst in pj’s in the comfort of my living room, the day for presenting arrived. Those that know me, know that I’m not too shy when it comes to presenting but this felt different and I really wanted to get the crowd engaged, and practise good storytelling. I arrived on the day and was welcomed, especially by fellow Horizon-er Peter Boyes who was the one who suggested my talk to the Pint of Science crew. I learnt that I would be the last talk and I did something I have never done before, I walked up to the bar and ordered a big old pint, a packet of crisps and enjoyed the wait.  Normally, I would find this process to be mildly agonising, having to wait until it’s your go. My parents have got a collection of photos of me when I was a child having to wait for a funfair ride. Let me set the scene – fists in a ball screaming at the top of my lungs. I guess that never leaves you which is why I’d much rather go first. The pint helped.

My talk aimed at providing a whistle-stop tour of the ways I’ve interacted with AI and mental health. To start off by loosely introducing AI, providing some of the state of the art ways that it’s being used, provide a summary of the ways I’ve got to engage in the sector and present what I consider to be current issues on this. I can say, this is not how it went down. I was approximately 3 slides in and then was hit with an image that’ll never leave me and this was a black screen with the text “slide show ended”. And it was right at this moment that I realised that I had sent over some butchered version of my slide show. I had only one copy of the slides which I had sent over – how could this happen! I also realised that I had saved the slideshow on my *desktop* (like, seriously, who does that!) with no remote drive links sprinkled in fairy dust to access it. A sudden wave of appreciation of being last hit me like a wave because the crowd just bobbed along as on average everyone was around 3 pints down!

Pete and I scrambled in the corner to find another presentation I could quickly deliver and we settled at an older MRL lab talk about a piece of research I had published. This piece of work explored the extent of user involvement in the design of mental health technology And lo and behold, the new structure:

The new structure of the talk

    1. Background of mental health technology
    2. The research questions
    3. The method of exploration
    4. Our results
    5. What we recommend for the future

Getting into the nitty-gritty:

    1. Background of mental health technology

Self-monitoring applications for mental health technology are increasing in numbers. The involvement of users has been informed by its long history in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and is becoming a core concern for designers working in this space. The application of models of involvement,  such as user-centered design (UCD), is becoming standardised to optimise the reach, adoption and sustained use of this type of technology.

    1. The research questions

This paper examined the current ways in which users are involved in the design and evaluation of self-monitoring applications, specifically for bipolar disorder by investigating three specific questions a) are users being involved in the design and evaluation of technology?  b) if so, how is this happening? and lastly, c) what are the best practice ‘ingredients’ regarding the design of mental health technology?

    1. The method of exploration

To explore these practices, we reviewed available literature for self-tracking technology for bipolar disorder and made an overall assessment of the level of user involvement in design. The findings were reviewed by an expert panel, including an individual with lived experience of bipolar disorder, to form best practice “ingredients”  for design of mental health technology.  This combines the already existing practices of patient and public involvement and human-computer interaction to evolve from the generic guidelines of UCD to ones that are tailored towards mental health technology.

    1. Our results

For question a), it was found that out of the 13 novel smartphone applications included in this review, 4 self-monitoring applications were classified as having no mention of user involvement in the design, 3 self-monitoring applications were classified as having low user involvement, 4 self-monitoring applications were classified as having medium user involvement and 2 self-monitoring applications were classified as high user involvement. In regards to question b), it was found that despite the presence of extant approaches for the involvement of the user in the process of design and evaluation, there is large variability in whether the user is involved, how they are involved and to what extent there is a reported emphasis on the voice of the user, which is the ultimate aim of design approaches involved in mental health technology.

    1. What we recommend for the future

As per question c), it is recommended that users are involved in all stages of design with the ultimate goal to empower and create empathy for the user. Users should be involved early in the process of design and this should not just be limited to design itself, but also associated research ensuring end-to-end involvement. The communities in the healthcare-based design and human-computer interaction design need to work together to increase awareness of the different methods available and encourage the use and mixing of the methods, as well as establish better mechanisms to reach the target user group. Future research using systematic literature search methods should explore this further.

Closing remarks

Adaptability is the moral of the story here! Practice can make perfect but in the end, technology failed me even though my talk was about technology – ironically! I guess I was more proud of delivering the talk in this haphazard way, compared to if I delivered on cue like I practised. Another reflection that I made is that after 4 years of doing a PhD, it’s interesting how you can naturally talk about the topic at hand – so rambling for 20 mins just flowed. Talking about your PhD for a non-technical audience was also a very interesting experience too and a great experience to practise good storytelling.